Ben Sixsmith is an English writer. He has written for Quillette, Areo, The Catholic Herald, The American Conservative and Arc Digital on a variety of topics including literature and politics.
On 31 August 1939, a false flag attack was staged on a radio tower in Gleiwitz — now Gliwice — in Upper Silesia. A Pole named Franciszek Honiok was murdered by the Germans, dressed in a Polish military uniform and left near the station to implicate his countrymen. His was the first death of the Second World War. Tens of millions of men, women and children would follow him.
If the average Westerner knows anything about Polish history it is that Poland is where World War Two began. Even these events are often misunderstood, with non-Poles having an unfortunate tendency to believe that the Germans tore through Poland with ease, when, as Roger Moorhouse writes in Poland 1939, Polish resistance was brave and determined.
Somehow, Polish history is both more grim and more glorious than foreigners suppose. Our hypothetical Westerner might know that Britain and France declared war on Germany after it invaded Poland. He or she is less liable to know that Poland received minimal support and was abandoned to the communists in the aftermath of the war. Granted, the Western Allies may not have had the power to stop the Soviets from imposing their will on the nations that fell beneath the Iron Curtain. But they did not have to be so spineless — even supporting Stalin in his cover-up of the Katyn Massacre, where the Soviets killed 20,000 Polish officers, intellectuals, politicians and physicians.
At its worst, complacent ignorance can lead people to conflate victims and criminals — epitomised by the infamous term “Polish death camps”. Of course, there were Poles who turned in their Jewish neighbours, and that deserves acknowledgement. But to smear the millions of Poles who fought and died in the war by association with this small-souled minority is unconscionable.
But I do not wish this little tour through Polish history to focus only on its sad and horrid episodes. There have certainly been a lot of them. Only two decades before the outbreak of World War Two, Poland had escaped more than a hundred years of partitioning — being split between Russia, Prussia and Austria. After Hitler’s fall, Poland would endure almost fifty years of communism, with its cultural and economic stagnancy and its political injustice.
Yet there is a lot in Polish history which is inspirational as well as that which is sobering. There was the resistance against partitioning, Nazism and communism, most clearly — from the valiant young men and women who fought and died in impossible conditions against the Nazis and the Soviets to the trade unionists who went on strike against the stifling oppression of the communists. (Readers who want to learn more might be interested in my essays on these subjects in Quillette and The Critic.)
Polish resistance was perhaps even more significant in the unheralded realm of mathematics. It was Polish mathematicians — Marian Rejewiski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Różycki — who did the major early work in breaking Germany’s “Enigma” ciphering scheme, which was crucial to German intelligence. They handed their work over to the French and the British when Poland was invaded, enabling the more extensive decrypting that took place at Bletchley Park. A Polish engineer, Józef Kosacki, also made an invaluable contribution to the Allied war effort by inventing the portable mine detector, which he donated to the British rather than patenting.
But the Poles have also enjoyed military triumphs, and with great consequences for the whole of Europe. In 1920, Soviet Russia invaded Poland, with Lenin, as Zara Steiner comments in The Lights That Failed, “tempted by the opportunity to carry the revolution to the borders of Germany and possibly to Germany itself”.
The Red Army powered towards Warsaw, enjoying significant material advantages, but it had underestimated the Poles. Felix Dzerzhinsky, who had been born in Poland but had become one of the top Bolshevik killers, had assured Lenin that “the working masses of Warsaw are awaiting the arrival of the Red Army”. Not a bit of it. A Polish counter-offensive crushed the Red Army in what has become known as the “Miracle on the Vistula” and the Poles drove the Soviets from the country. The rest of Europe had been spared armed confrontation.
Polish troops had been decisive in protecting Europe hundreds of years before. It was Polish cavalry, under the command of King Jan III Sobieski, who smashed the Ottoman invaders in the Battle of Vienna in 1683, allowing the Holy Roman Empire to prevail.
As tempting as it is, among Poles and non-Poles alike, to see Polish history in shades of black, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which Sobieski led for part of its existence, was one of the largest and most advanced states in Europe — marked by political sophistication and religious tolerance. Even as it fell, amid dysfunction and decline, King Stanisław Augustus Poniatowski signed the Constitution of 3 May 1791 — the world’s second national constitution, which Edmund Burke called “the noblest benefit received by any nation at any time”. The modern barbarism that led the historian Timothy Snyder to call Central and Eastern Europe the “Bloodlands” should haunt us. But it should not obscure the nobility and creativity that has also existed in the region.
People with an interest in Polish history, or European history at large, should learn more about the horrors inflicted on Poles in the 20th Century. But they should also learn about the triumphs of Polish civilisation, in courageous resistance to evil and also in the bold creative fields of science and culture. We need all the inspiration we can get to rouse ourselves from the pettiness and parochialism of our times.
